I am not, by any standard, a neat person. I try to corral my chaos into various acceptable containers—junk drawer, closet, under the bed, giant plastic tubs of doom—and when guests come over, maintain the illusion that I have a handle on my life. I’m not a slob, but I am a maximalist, and my whole life, I have felt deep shame about it. Particularly when it comes to my kitchen.
I am a food writer and I love having people over to eat dinner, so my friends and acquaintances see a fair amount of my kitchen. And until pretty recently, that kitchen was the size of a tiny closet in a Brooklyn apartment, where I have stuffed all my equipment and various salts. I use sheet pans for everything: spare counter space, serving dishes, places to organize my ingredients. And as a result, they are far from sparkling silver. No matter how much I scrub at them, no matter what method—baking soda and vinegar, Bar Keepers Friend, industrial-grade oven cleaner—they accumulate along with the telltale grime of use at the corners. Every time a new article pops up with a brilliant, no-fail cleaning method for making baking sheets look brand new, I click. And every single time, my baking sheets, though perfectly clean, would not look anything like new.They look used because I use them.
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